Why does God speak only Arabic?

  • Thread starter Thread starter JimG
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
rossum said:
Nonsense. God only speaks the King’s English. Specifically King James’ English as found in the King James Version. 🙂

rossum
Click to expand...
“The ultimate truth is that there is no Ultimate Truth.” Are you sure that is true? 👍
 
rossum said:
Relatively sure. 🙂

rossum
Click to expand...
“The ultimate truth is that there is no Ultimate Truth”; are you ultimate sure that is true? You don’t see the circular reasoning. If you say there is no truth; then what you said is also not true because there is no truth; whereas if I say the truth is there is truth; there is no circular reasoning.
 
Tanner9188 said:
“The ultimate truth is that there is no Ultimate Truth”; are you ultimate sure that is true? You don’t see the circular reasoning. If you say there is no truth; then what you said is also not true because there is no truth; whereas if I say the truth is there is truth; there is no circular reasoning.
Click to expand...
You are not the first to notice my sig. The original source is Mark Siderits, “Thinking on Empty: Madhyamika Anti-Realism and Canons of Rationality” in S Biderman and B.A. Schaufstein, eds, Rationality In Question (1989). Dordrecht: Brill.

I have not read Siderits but saw the quote in a piece on Nagarjuna. The “Madhyamika” in Siderits’ title refers to the religious and philosophical school of Buddhism that Nagarjuna founded. I have seen the same quote again in other places in reference to the Madhyamika and Nagarjuna - it seems quite popular. The quote is intentionally paradoxical; paradox is necessary to remind us that words are insufficient when trying to describe the fundamental nature of reality.

For a philosophical discussion of Nagarjuna and reality see the web article Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought. The Siderits quote is at the end of section four of the article:

There is, then, no escape. Nagarjuna’s view is contradictory. The contradiction is, clearly a paradox of expressibility. Nagarjuna succeeds in saying the unsayable, just as much as the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. We can think (and characterize) reality only subject to language, which is conventional, so the ontology of that reality is all conventional. It follows that the conventional objects of reality do not ultimately (non-conventionally) exist. It also follows that nothing we say of them is ultimately true. That is, all things are empty of ultimate existence; and this is their ultimate nature, and is an ultimate truth about them. They hence cannot be thought to have that nature; nor can we say that they do. But we have just done so. As Mark Siderits (1989) has put it, “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth.”

For an alternative description of the same thing, try:The emptiness of emptiness is the fact that not even emptiness exists ultimately, that it is also dependent, conventional, nominal, and in the end it is just the everydayness of the everyday. Penetrating to the depths of being, we find ourselves back on the surface of things and so discover that there is nothing, after all, beneath those deceptive surfaces. Moreover, what is deceptive about them is simply the fact that we assume ontological depth lurking just beneath.

Jay Garfield, “Empty words, Buddhist philosophy and cross-cultural interpretation.” OUP 2002.
rossum
 
meedo said:
Peace

Allah speaks in whatever language he likes. It is just that the last Book from him was in arabic . His words will always be preserved same as they are revealed to The prophet Muhammed PBUH . If you wanna translate it to another language then it is called " Translation of the meanings of The Quran "

No language translates exactly from other language . That is why we hold ONLY the Quran in Arabic to be Allah’s words.

Peace
Click to expand...
OK, before I get clobbered on this one, let me put the disclaimer up first.
  1. I am a Christian, a Mormon and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I do not believe that the Q’uran is scripture.
  2. I am not Muslim, disagree with quite a bit of the Muslim faith, and have no intent to convert.
These two things said (and no, I’m not going to respond to anybody who gets insulted at my claim to be a Christian), I think that the Muslim position on this matter is highly logical.

The problems involved in translation are such that one simply cannot translate from one language to another and get precisely the same meaning. You can come close, but you can’t be exact. There are inflections, tenses, ideological and symbolic meanings that simply do not translate.

Not to mention that a translation requires a translator, and a translator is human, thus imperfect; a translator of scripture is going to have his or her own biases, and so will change the meaning of the words. He may not intend to, and may honestly work very hard NOT to, but he can’t not change it; he reads what he reads, and translates the meaning he gets from the one language–then attempts to recreate it in the other one. Something is going to be lost, or be changed. It is inevitable.

This is not a huge problem for most publications–even the bible isn’t going to be hurt much by this, because even the most virulent of biblical inerrantists believes that the bible is only inerrant in the original. As well, the bible was written by men, who took what God told them, and then put that in their own words. We understand that.

Muslims, however, (if I’m wrong about this, please correct me) believe that the Q’uran was quite literally dictated to Mohammad. They are not his words telling us stuff. They are God’s words. Specifically. Directly. Inviolate—and thus any attempt to translate it is to change it, and make the book imperfect.

Muslims, in other words, truly DO believe that their scriptures are inerrant, and do what true scriptural inerrantists would have to do to protect them. Keep them in the language in which they were dictated.

Anyway, it makes sense to me, even if I do think that the Q’uran isn’t ‘true’ in the way that the bible and the Book of Mormon are.

Diana, waiting for the explosions…
 
dianaiad said:
OK, before I get clobbered on this one, let me put the disclaimer up first.
  1. I am a Christian, a Mormon and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I do not believe that the Q’uran is scripture.
  2. I am not Muslim, disagree with quite a bit of the Muslim faith, and have no intent to convert.
These two things said (and no, I’m not going to respond to anybody who gets insulted at my claim to be a Christian), I think that the Muslim position on this matter is highly logical.

The problems involved in translation are such that one simply cannot translate from one language to another and get precisely the same meaning. You can come close, but you can’t be exact. There are inflections, tenses, ideological and symbolic meanings that simply do not translate.

Not to mention that a translation requires a translator, and a translator is human, thus imperfect; a translator of scripture is going to have his or her own biases, and so will change the meaning of the words. He may not intend to, and may honestly work very hard NOT to, but he can’t not change it; he reads what he reads, and translates the meaning he gets from the one language–then attempts to recreate it in the other one. Something is going to be lost, or be changed. It is inevitable.

This is not a huge problem for most publications–even the bible isn’t going to be hurt much by this, because even the most virulent of biblical inerrantists believes that the bible is only inerrant in the original. As well, the bible was written by men, who took what God told them, and then put that in their own words. We understand that.

Muslims, however, (if I’m wrong about this, please correct me) believe that the Q’uran was quite literally dictated to Mohammad. They are not his words telling us stuff. They are God’s words. Specifically. Directly. Inviolate—and thus any attempt to translate it is to change it, and make the book imperfect.

Muslims, in other words, truly DO believe that their scriptures are inerrant, and do what true scriptural inerrantists would have to do to protect them. Keep them in the language in which they were dictated.

Anyway, it makes sense to me, even if I do think that the Q’uran isn’t ‘true’ in the way that the bible and the Book of Mormon are.

Diana, waiting for the explosions…
Click to expand...
You asked for it:

I agree.

From the Muslim perspective, and objectively, it makes perfect sense that, if God gave this revelation in Arabic, the purest form of that revelation would be in the language that it was given in, Arabic.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top